Resurrection Express (38 page)

So why does this all feel so wrong . . .

I’m a killer now. Like my father.

Murdered someone with my own hands . . .

The nightmare shifts gears and the punishment comes now, sparks of memories spritzing on and off like the channels on an old color TV set with the sound turned way up—so that the voices and the muzzleflashes and the music top out the speaker system and overload the amplifiers—static blowing past me, empty stations hovering in the blank canyons of absolutely nowhere. Pieces of my life, shattered and flickering in a horrible slipstream, slashing me, mocking me . . .

You’re a killer now, son. Welcome to the monster club.

I see the first job I ever did, the one that didn’t go so well. Two cops on the street when we walked out. My father, his finger fast on the trigger. The sneering smiles of a million angry gods right in my face as the gun blows my mind . . .

Unbreakable.

I see the first time I was in jail, surrounded by the smell of sweat and stale cigarette smoke and plots that go nowhere because you’re a loser. The face of the man who called himself Shanker, the first guy who ever tried to kick my ass, and his blood still salty and desperate in my mouth . . .

Unbreakable.

I see David Hartman, sitting behind his desk, telling me about the power and the glory, all those god-awful life-worn clichés dangling in front of me like a joke told to an eight-year-old who doesn’t understand anything . . . and his cruel stare . . . his hand on the meat cleaver . . . telling me he has the last laugh after all . . .

. . . and I fight him.

I fight his image back.

Because I beat this asshole. I won already.

I’m not a killer, not the way they are.

I am better than monsters like this.

Unbreakable.

•  •  •

T
oni . . . it’s Toni now. I see her face, for real, just a glimpse—and she looks like the girl who tried to fool me—but then it’s gone. And then it’s back. And then it’s gone again. Urgent flashes in the dark. Telling me I have to get up. I can’t stay here. It’s time to run like hell. I mutter something to the ghost in my head, telling her my legs are gone now. They got me good.
You can only dance the edge for so long
 . . .
and love does not stay
 . . .

Get up, she tells me.

Don’t pussy out.

She touches my face and her fingers are cold. They smear something on my cheek, and it’s warm. Streaks of blood. It’s just a dream.

It’s the girl now, right in front of me.

The girl who looks like Toni.

Or maybe she looks like Toni.

The fingers form into a hard slap across my face now. I can hear her voice, telling me to get up. It wasn’t Toni, it was just some girl. The voices that mock me . . . they recede back ever so slightly . . . and the parking garage smears into view for just a moment. I realize I’ve been crawling towards a hallucination this whole time. I’m up for air and I have this one chance. I open my mouth and words come out. I control them in quick bursts, though the shoots of pain in my side.

I speak into the cell phone and call for help.

My fingers have dialed 911 and I’m telling them to come get me.

They’ll find me.

They’ll arrest me.

But they’ll save my life.

The girl nods yes.

She looks so much like Toni when she nods like that.

Get up, she tells me.

Don’t pussy out.

Get up now.

GET UP AND RUN!

And as her voice rips through my head, the pain in my body explodes like magma, the images shattering like fragile faces blown to hell . . . and it’s the worst pain I’ve ever felt . . . the final pain . . .
the pain of losing everything in one moment of absolute failure and weakness . . . and I’m screaming . . . SCREAMING . . .

•  •  •

T
he rage thunders back, crashing upward from my destroyed bones, blasting through my eyes, setting the metal in my skull on fire . . .

. . . and there they all are . . .

. . . my father . . .

. . . my teachers . . .

. . . Toni.

It’s you.

Not some phantom, not a woman that tells lies.

It’s really you.

I’ve waited so long for this moment.

This moment happened so long ago
.

It’s our wedding, solidifying all around me in beautiful detail, the white-on-white of the room that surrounds us, all full of silks and curtains and fluttering lace, rose petals at our feet, her sharp scent swirling like invisible tongues of sweet dragon breath, her
face smiling with all the promises we made before this, and the promises we make now. She stares at me with eyes that can see across time, see into the future. The image of her face is so clear now, and I keep expecting to lose it, keep expecting her eyes to turn black or fill with blood, while the pain in my head punishes me and the voices slither back to mock me . . . but this is the moment . . .
the real moment
 . . . brought back to me because I’m almost dead in the real world . . .

Yes.

Almost dead.

I can almost feel my body back there.

Almost feel the blood running from me, my bones shattered and useless.

But I don’t care.

Because she moves towards me in the white room, her black hair stunning and shimmering against the backdrop of heaven, the sleek lines of her soft chin and high cheekbones tracing perfection. Her skin creamy white, flawless. Black lipstick in the soft, sweet shape of a heart as she speaks her vows to me, telling me that it was destiny, that it was fate, that she will never leave me in a million years, even if she does. She tells me we are bonded by so much more than flesh and blood. So much more than the idle promises human beings make when they think they can. In this room, there is no one else, just the two of us. And I hold her in my arms and I feel the perfection of her flesh, the swell of her breasts, the slope of her waist and the canyons of her back, my hands running deep there. And I see the years that will come after our wedding superimposed on the fluttering silk walls, like movies: all the hard times and the good times and the jobs we do together, every moment brought back in one single burst, like a doctor administering a shot of something heavy. Someone tells me it’s okay as I lie there and watch it all. Someone says I’m going
to be all right, and I believe him, because I can die now, watching the memories, the images of Toni, fully formed and smiling at me, exploding in layer upon layer. I’m on a stretcher, and I can tell we’re moving fast, inside a moving vehicle. But the memories jet over me faster, still superimposed over my sight, and Toni says she loves me again. A siren overhead, screaming back into the street behind us. I can’t move and I don’t feel anything. Toni smiles and her smile is more beautiful than anything. I expected to be handcuffed but I’m not. There’s no cop in here, nobody to tell me I’m in deep shit or asking me questions I don’t have to answer because I have the right to remain silent. The room we were married in hovers just out of sight now, years down the line. David Hartman is in the room now, killing Axl, and he has no idea that we gave our vows there, and I never tell him, because that would give him everything. I beat you in the end, David. I avenged everyone you ever murdered in that white room. And I got her back. She’s mine again. As I lie here, unable to move. As the EMS guy hovers over me with the defib paddles, telling me it’s all okay.

“Nobody dies in my fucking ambulance,” he says.

Something punches into me like a fist, and I go back to the white room again.

18

00000-18

THE TWO TONIS

O
ne more time, back from the dead.

They’re rolling me down a long back tunnel.

Jumbled voices.

People crying.

The smell of sterile things, like scalpels and rubbing alcohol.

I feel the grinding vibration of wheels just under my body.

I decide it’s a comfort.

Even though I’m 100 percent screwed.

•  •  •

T
he next few moments may happen over a few hours, a few days, a few weeks, a few years. It’s a mosaic scattered in front of me. Shattered bits of images, people. No memories. No emotions. No Toni. Just the here and now, whatever it is, wherever it is. The beeping of a life-support monitor. The clinking of metal instruments. The cursing of professionals. The scent of blood, crawling up my nose like salt water dripping from a rusty razor. Something I never got used to.

Things that are inevitable.

•  •  •

B
ack.

For keeps now.

I peel my eyes open and there’s another white room all around me. I know this can’t be heaven, because I’m pretty sure that heaven doesn’t exist. I know this isn’t the bridal suite of the Driskill Hotel, because that all happened a million years ago. My arms move on their own, and I feel my face, making sure I’m still all there. I feel no pain, but I see tubes and wires attached to me. An IV feeding my bloodstream saline and a drug pump doing something sleepy to my mind. There’s a blue-and-white smock covering my chest, a sheet and a thin blanket over me. I’m in a bed with steel rails along either side. My wrists aren’t handcuffed to anything. I decide I’m not dreaming.

My legs.

I can’t feel my legs.

An old nurse sits near me in a chair, next to the life-support devices. She looks up from her newspaper, her expression neutral.

“Hello there,” she says to me.

I’m surprised to find that making my own voice happen is easy, though it sounds like a gravel road. “Where am I?”

“Ben Taub Trauma Center. You’re okay. You had to have emergency surgery.”

Ben Taub. This place is notorious. A charity drop. A drug lord sent his posse to shoot the place up a few years back. Said it was revenge for something bad.

“I can’t remember . . . how I got here.”

“You’ve been here three days.” That’s all she says. She gets up and folds her paper under her arm. Turns sharply and leaves me in the room. Thanks a lot, lady.

I sit and I try to organize my thoughts.

Three days.

Does Jenison know I’m here?

Does anyone know I’m here?

They have me on a morphine drip, or maybe something stronger.
I can tell that because my thoughts are damn hard to organize. The room is small, private. The door is wide open and the hall outside is dark. They have the lights on in here to wake me up. I wonder if they figured on me ever waking up at all.

My legs.

I can’t feel them, not at all down there.

I look to see if they’re still attached, and they are.

But I can’t feel them.

I can’t move them.

Ben Taub is part of the Hermann Healthcare Center, near the Fourth Ward barrio just past the Montrose area, just a few miles from where the bad business went down. I can hardly remember getting here.

I just remember being in the bridal suite again.

I remember Toni’s face now.

Clear in my head, like the smell of roses on our wedding day.

Like the scents she mixed herself—the scents that fooled me later.

And, yeah, I see that other version of her, too . . . still vaguely assigned to my memories. That girl who tried to be Toni. She remains in my head as a sort of reminder. She snipes at me and laughs that I was ever such an idiot.

The two Tonis are a lot alike, actually.

They both have long black hair.

They both smell like roses.

They are both strong, powerful.

But the real Toni is taller, blacker. Like a sleek bird traced in neon, her face angled upward, elegantly like an empress or a rock star, her skin so white you can see through the empty space and into your own soul. Her body is slim and corded, wide shoulders cascading into a creamy canyon, flowing into her hips and legs like a liquid metal goddess in perpetual motion, a statue carved in
flowing milk and muscle, like rivers leading downward and downward, the sleek curves of her waist and the soft innocence of her naval so white and so washed in sin and wisdom . . .

Before I can think about it anymore, I hear the sharp clock of expensive shoes in the hallway outside, and they enter the room, attached to a guy in a black suit and a thin white coat. I always wonder why they make doctors wear those. I think it’s to sell the lie that they know what the hell they’re doing half the time.

“Hi guy,” he says, a little too cheerfully. He’s not an old man, but not quite young anymore. He could be anybody.

Have to play this careful.

“Hello,” I say to him, sounding as confused as I can. It isn’t hard.

“How are we feeling?”

Terrible. I have no idea how
you’re
feeling.

I don’t say that out loud. Instead, I open my mouth and words come out that sound like this:

“Where am I?”

“Hermann Hospital. You had emergency surgery two days ago.” Then he gives me the edge I need: “Do you remember anything? Can you tell me your name?”

“I . . . don’t know. You have my ID, don’t you?”

“There was nothing in your pockets. You were admitted as a John Doe. We found the cell phone you called the ambulance with. You were still holding it when the EMS techs got to you.”

“Ambulance?”

“You had a close call, guy. They had to zap you on the way here.”

“What happened to me?”

“Looks like you were mugged. Beaten and shot. My guess is that they left you for dead.”

“I can’t remember anything.”

“Can you remember your name?”

“No.”

I let the lie drift across in a pathetic croak. Looks like he buys it. I can tell from the dull snort and shake of his head. Like this happens all the time.

“Doesn’t surprise me,” he says. “You were in a coma for several hours before you stabilized. Had a pretty severe head concussion. Someone hit you real hard, maybe with a pipe. You have a small plate in your head, also. Looks like it could be the result of a gunshot wound. Do you remember how you got that?”